Monday, December 20, 2010

In case you did not follow this thread in the arduino forum, here is a summary.
We were able to adapt the ht1632 library written by westfw for the 2416 monochrome display, to the new and improved, bigger and better, 3216 dual color LED display (datasheet here).

The biggest challenge was to figure out that each chip (of the four) on the display board requires its own CS (chip select) signal. The result of this understanding allowed the modification of the old functions by adding an extra parameter to specify which chip will get the command or the data.

Below is a short video of the game of life running on Arduino 328 connected to the 3216 display. Note that an extra wire is required (to carry the CS signal), compared to the old 2416 display (which had 4 switches to select the CS "address", useful for cascading).